


the best part

by icygrace



Category: Reign (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Brotherly Love, F/M, Francis is a wise little brother, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-13
Packaged: 2018-04-04 07:02:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4129108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icygrace/pseuds/icygrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“How do you give up a part of yourself, the best part of yourself, your own child?” He rises from his seat, leaves the room, and, not bothering to knock, opens the door of the room next door, where his future awaits him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the best part

**Author's Note:**

> Reign does not belong to me and definitely not any dialogue from the show included here.
> 
> Double posting (two different stories) today! Hooray!

“Where is she?” Mary asks with concern in her voice.

 

“She’s not coming.”

 

“What do you mean she’s not _coming_?”

 

“She’s staying in the village tonight, with Greer. She’s – Mary, she’s brought the baby.”

 

“She _what_?”

 

“She says she’ll keep her here as her sister’s baby.”

 

“She doesn’t even –”

 

“Exactly. But I didn’t think she should return to the castle yet, certainly not with the baby; this wasn’t your plan.”

 

“I arranged everything – the family, the voyage, the story, I even persuaded Bash to wait for their annulment until she’d been back for a time to quiet any gossip; we were agreed!”

 

“I know; I was there. I’m sorry, but . . . Mary, do try to understand . . . She wanted to be a mother and she got her wish in the worst possible circumstances. And yet – how do you give up a part of yourself, the best part of yourself, your own child?”

 

Mary sighs. “I may not be a mother, but I can understand that. I wish – well, wishing won’t do any good. But that story – I don’t know that I can protect her, her reputation. It’s transparent and you know it.”

 

“It’s a risk she’s willing to take. The reason her return voyage took so long?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“She turned back around. She’d left the baby with that family and she couldn’t bear it. She went back to get her and had to wait for the next ship to book passage again.”

 

Mary sighs again. “I’ll have to go talk with her tomorrow.”

 

“She does appreciate what you’ve done for her, truly. She wants you to know that.”

 

“I do.”

 

\---

 

“Lola.”

 

Lola turns, startled. “Bash.”

 

“I – I couldn’t help but overhear you and Mary.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“I gather Kenna has returned?”

 

“Yes.” There’s a long, excruciating pause before Lola speaks again, beginning to turn in the opposite direction. “I should – Jean –”

 

“Wait.”

 

“Yes?”

 

“How – how is she?”

 

“Well enough, I suppose. Of course, travel is always tiring.” Lola says, doing an admirable job of keeping her voice even and casual despite the discomfort this conversation is obviously causing her.

 

“And so recently after a confinement,” he agrees, refusing to let Lola skirt around the subject.

 

“Not _so_ recently. But yes, I suppose.”

 

“And with an infant in tow.”

 

“You want to make this as difficult as possible, don’t you?” Lola says, a bit jokingly.

 

“Yes,” he replies in the same tone. “Why would she –”

 

Lola sighs, loud and heartfelt enough that his question dies on his lips. “Mary means to go to Greer’s tomorrow to try and talk some sense into her. But I don’t think it’ll do any good.” Lola looks down sadly, before looking back up at him. “I feel for her, I really do. I don’t think I could’ve borne it either.”

 

\---

 

“Might I speak to your madam?” he asks the overly-painted woman who opens the door.

 

“She doesn’t –”

 

“ _Just_ speak,” he emphasizes.

 

The woman takes him to a well-appointed office in the back.

 

“Bash!”

 

“Please not so loud, Greer.” He has no idea where Mary and Kenna are in the house.

 

“I’m sorry. I – I must admit I’m surprised to see you.”

 

And then he hears Kenna’s voice from the next room and his stomach swoops. But then it sinks as he listens to her: her voice sounds the way it always did right before she was about to cry. “Of course I understand. I’ll just – I’ll stay with Greer, if she’ll have me, until things are sorted. I befriended someone on my voyage to Sweden who might be able to help.”

 

“Kenna, I’m sorry, I want you to stay here; we’ve – _I’ve_ missed you, truly –”

 

“I know. I missed you too, so much. But I understand there are some things not even a queen can do.”

 

“I wish it were different. I wish I could make all this right for you.” Mary sighs. “It’s not nearly as much as I’d like to do, but I will give you money for your voyage and to help you settle in, at least. And you must write to me and tell me how you’re doing and if you ever need my help. You’re my friend and you can count on me, always.”

 

“Mary, you don’t –”

 

“Please, it’s the least I can do. I was supposed to give you all dowries, remember?”

 

Kenna half-laughs. “My father was too proud for that.”

 

“Speaking of dowries, perhaps . . . Perhaps Bash might return yours, if you settle the annulment before you depart?”

 

Kenna sighs. “Perhaps. But he was so angry with me before I left because . . . well, you know why. It was wrong, but I was terrified, Mary. I . . . I knew it would come to this, that I wouldn’t be able to do it. Even then I cared too much.”

 

“Oh, Kenna.” There’s a long silence. “But he’s a good man. He’ll recognize that you need to take care of your child.”

 

“I hope so. What’s –”

 

“Oh, she’s waking up,” Mary interrupts, so softly he barely catches it. “May I –”

 

“Of course.”

 

“Oh, there’s a girl. Oh . . . oh yes, you’ve opened your eyes for me. What pretty eyes you have, Alison. . . Such pretty eyes?” Mary’s voice trails off, as if asking a question.

 

There’s a very long silence.

 

“Kenna?”

 

“Yes?”

 

“She has lovely eyes.” A pause. “But not your eyes. And we might have been little girls the last time I saw them, but I remember your father and your mother and your brother, too. Not theirs either.”

 

“No.”

 

“When I look at her, do you know who I see?”

 

“Mary –”

 

“I see you, of course. But I don’t see Renaude. I see Bash.”

 

He can’t help the sharp intake of breath. Although he and Greer both know they’re eavesdropping, he hasn’t been so obvious about it, but Mary sounds so certain of something he knows to be an impossibility that he’s been stunned breathless.

 

“I even see Diane; of course, Bash takes more after her than after Henry. But there is nothing of Renaude in her. How could that be the case?”

 

“When the pains started, I thought the baby was coming early, that there was no way it would survive so early. But she was fine . . . perfect.” Kenna’s voice softens. “Healthy. The midwife told me she was clearly a nine-month baby, that I must have gotten it wrong, but I . . . I couldn’t stand the thought that I’d gotten something so important wrong, something that would’ve made all the difference to her life, that I’d _ruined_ her life before she was ever born. I tried to put that possibility out of my mind, but as you said, you remember my father and my brother. They’re darker-haired than me. I thought perhaps she’d taken after them. But then I delayed my departure, said I still didn’t feel fully recovered, because I couldn’t bear to leave her. The weeks passed and babies’ eyes, they’re always blue at first, you know, no matter what color they’ll end up, but then hers began to turn green. And I wondered again if I’d been wrong. I didn’t want to see it, but – you see it, too, don’t you?”

 

“But if you were wrong, that means –”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Kenna, then –”

 

“It doesn’t matter, Mary.”

 

“Of course it _matters_ ; you said it yourself – it makes all the difference!”

 

“Not now, he’d never believe me, not after I tried to trick him.”

 

He feels . . . shame isn’t the word for it, but . . . something. She isn’t wrong. If he weren’t overhearing this conversation, well-aware that she has no idea he is listening, he wouldn’t believe it for a moment.

 

“You were scared,” Mary says, sympathy filling her words. “You were scared and you were trying to do what was best for your child. It wasn’t fair to him, if you believed its father to be Renaude, but a good mother . . . a good mother would do anything for her child. Even if Bash still can’t understand that or forgive it . . . the truth is written in her face.”

 

“But –”

 

“And it will come out, Kenna, whether you want it to or not. The last time I tried to keep a secret like this – well, you know how it turned out.”

 

Lola and Jean and Francis, of course.

 

“But it’s not like that. He _hates_ me now.”

 

He can feel Greer’s eyes on him, but he studiously refuses to look at her and tries to get his breathing under control.

 

“We’ll make each other miserable for the rest of our lives.”

 

“She deserves his name and his protection, not to be passed off as your niece for the rest of _her_ life,” Mary insists.

 

“But we’ll make her miserable, too, and that I couldn’t bear, Mary.” The tears he heard in Kenna’s voice when he first arrived finally make their way to the surface.

 

\---

 

“Bash –” Greer whispers after a long silence punctuated only by soft sobs.

 

“They’ve been here with you. Do you agree with Mary?” he asks tightly.

 

Greer doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

 

He rises from his seat, leaves the room, and, not bothering to knock, opens the door of the room next door, where his future awaits him.

 

“I heard everything.”

 

Mary and Kenna both jump, turning to him. Surprise colors Mary’s features, while the color drains from Kenna’s. She wipes brusquely at her eyes.

 

“When you thought your child Renaude’s, you meant to trick me into calling it mine; now that you know her to be mine, you meant to let me believe she was Renaude’s child masquerading as your niece.” He shakes his head, scoffing. “You are an incorrigible liar, Kenna.”

 

Though angry color rises in her cheeks, Kenna remains silent.

 

“But I won’t stand for it any longer. You’ll both return to court with me now and your things will be sent for later.”

 

\---

 

When their carriage arrives at the castle gates, he first hands Mary down, who takes the baby from Kenna, and then Kenna. He schools his expression into perfect neutrality – he cannot manage a smile, but it is a decided improvement on the dark scowl he wore for the duration of their carriage ride – for the benefit of the guards. He knows the men who worked for him had wondered at Kenna’s absence, but dared not question it. He lifts her hand to his lips. “Welcome back, dear wife.”

 

Kenna removes her hand from his grasp as soon as she can without raising questions, taking the baby back from Mary at once.

 

“And I am so eager for our daughter to meet her uncle,” he adds, publicly laying claim to the baby once and for all.

 

“He is looking forward to it,” Mary replies. She is to go to Francis now and explain things to him, so his reaction does not give away the game.

 

\---

 

Francis, too, plays his part in this farce beautifully when they bring the baby forward.

 

It’s informal, of course; they go to Francis’s office, since it’s not as if courtiers bring their infant children to court gatherings. The point is to have the servants and guards and whatever few advisers are around see them all act as if nothing is amiss and for castle gossip to take care of the rest. “Kenna. I’m glad to see you well. I hope your journey was pleasant.”

 

“Thank you. It was, but I’m glad to be back. I only wish it could’ve been sooner, but I didn’t want to risk traveling so –”

 

“Of course. And this is Alison.” Francis’s voice softens. His enthusiasm is unfeigned, Bash realizes, as his brother takes the baby from Kenna’s arms and looks warmly down at her.

 

“Alison Francine,” Bash corrects.

 

“Oh,” Mary smiles, directing her words at Kenna. “You didn’t say in your letter –”

 

She knows, of course. They decided on it in the carriage.

 

Francis looks up, smile widening before looking back down at the baby again. Either Mary hadn’t told him to garner a genuine reaction or his brother really is quite masterful.

 

“Bash wanted it to be a surprise,” Kenna says, turning her lips up at the corners, rendering her smile impressively genuine-looking.

 

“I’m quite touched.” Francis turns to Narcisse and the other men who surrounded Mary and him when they arrived. “Leave us.”

 

When they’re alone, the atmosphere tenses. Mary looks uncomfortably between him and Kenna, who won’t look at him at all, while Francis’s attention remains firmly fixed on the baby.

 

\---

 

At first, he doesn’t love his daughter. He feels an obligation, a duty, a _responsibility_ to her that he’s never felt before, not truly. A responsibility he’s never wanted before.

 

_And I'm sick of being judged for it just because you want less. Less comfort. Less responsibility. Less of me._

Kenna was a responsibility that had been thrust upon him by his father. Once, he told her he would always protect her, but she has a surprising knack for protecting herself. He could leave and know she would, for the most part, keep herself safe. (He doesn’t like to dwell on The Darkness.)

 

But Alison . . . Alison is a defenseless baby and the sense of responsibility he feels for her wellbeing is daunting and, though he’s ashamed to admit it later, unwelcome at first.

 

Then there is a day, a perfectly ordinary day, when he returns to the castle and rushes not to Francis to give him a report on the resolution of the latest crisis to come to his attention as king’s deputy, but to the nursery to check in on Alison. He realizes in that moment that he has, quite unintentionally and perhaps even unwillingly, fallen headlong into love with his daughter. He doesn’t know how or when, but he has. His life is now _after_ and he cannot remember _before_.

 

\----

 

Kenna was right when she said he didn’t have friends. He had people he was bound to and those people were Francis and her. Now, Francis slips further from him by the day and Kenna, his wife though she remains, may well be lost to him forever.

But Alison . . . he is bound more surely to her than he ever was to either of them. He feels hollowed out after the breakdown of his marriage, tainted after Delphine, but Alison is the best part of him and of her mother. She is innocent.

_Bash, you have no idea what it's like to be a girl in this world. Owning nothing, having no power except the effect that you have on men. The king noticed me, and for the first time, I mattered._

 

Alison offers him a chance to be a better man, to raise a child without the fears that plague her mother, without her father’s insecurities, a child who knows safety and unconditional love and her own worth.

 

\---

 

For a very long time after the day when his love for his daughter becomes as obvious to him as the nose on his face, he can’t shake the feelings of fear, of _guilt_.

 

If Kenna’s attachment to Alison hadn’t been so strong, Alison might be living her life with a different family, a different mother and father, in a different country. If Kenna hadn’t been brave and tried to brazen it out, if she’d loved Alison less . . . He would never have known her, would never even have known he had a daughter because he put her mother in an untenable position.

 

He dreams about it sometimes. Alison with the Swedish couple Kenna has spoken of in clipped sentences, growing up in their country home. Kenna and himself at court, their marriage annulled: he, oblivious and alone and so terribly lonely, and Kenna, missing Alison with every fiber of her being, every day for the rest of her life.  

 

He always wakes up alone, drenched in sweat and heart pounding, and must go to the nursery at once to assure himself that Alison is truly there (in France, at Fontainebleau, with _him_ ) and not in Sweden with the unknown couple that still haunts his dreams – the kind, deserving couple that took his wife in when he turned her away only to be denied a much-wanted child for their trouble, the couple that would likely have made far better parents than they ever will be.

 

The nursery maid comes to expect it over time, no longer startled when the king’s deputy rushes to the nursery in the middle of the night, disheveled and still in his nightclothes, to hover over his sleeping daughter’s cradle.                

 

\---

 

One day after he’s returned from an expedition, Francis asks him to stay behind after ordering everyone else to leave him. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”

 

He wonders if they are plans for Mary again, the same sort of plans Francis made when he feared he’d be made to answer for killing their father and Mary would be implicated. Now that Francis has revealed to him the truth of his condition, it is always there in the back of his mind, where he tries to keep it, convinced that somehow Francis will be saved.

 

“Your . . . situation with Kenna.”

 

“What about it?” he asks uneasily. They don’t do sentimental chats, the two of them. They ride, they spar, they joke, and he would die for his brother, but they’ve never really done heart-to-hearts. They have brief moments of sentiment here and there – when they made their peace before his nightmarish wedding, when their father died, when Francis named him his deputy – but little more than that.

 

“Do you think I could ever truly forget, Bash? Forget everything Mary’s done? The pain she caused me? Sometimes I still don’t even trust her. But somehow I still love her enough to try to forgive it all.” Francis looks very grave as he looks out the window. “Death is coming for me, and I won’t have any regrets when I’m staring it in the face.” Then Francis’s gaze rests on him again. “I hope you live a long life, brother, but I hope that you, too, make sure to have no regrets when you meet your maker.”

 

Francis is right. When did his little brother become so wise?

 

The problem, he realizes, is that he isn’t the only one with things to forgive.

 

\---

 

Still, after that enlightening and humbling conversation with his dying brother, he attempts his long-overdue and well-deserved apology to his wife. “I would never have turned you away if I’d known –”

 

But Kenna cuts him off and he realizes, even before she speaks, that it was all wrong.

 

“That Alison turned out to be your daughter isn’t the _point_. I understand that I deceived you and hurt you and I’m sorry about that. I hated that I hurt you. But you distrusted me, unfairly, long before that. And I told you . . . so many times I told you . . . how powerless I felt as a woman in this world. Then when I made a mistake because I was vulnerable and afraid and felt I could no longer rely on you to help me, you turned your back on me; you proved me right when I hoped desperately to be wrong. I understand that most men would have. I understand that you didn’t even have to wait to seek an annulment until I found someone else. I understand all of that.” She sounds so very sad and disappointed that he can’t quite look at her. “But I thought you were kinder, _better_ than most men.”

 

_You are kind. And strong. And the only man who’s ever put my needs above his own._

 

He believes he can be; he knows he will try to be. He wants his wife to look at him and see the man she once thought him to be.

 

No, not just that – he wants her to _love_ him. It might be selfish, but he doesn’t know if he can live with her but without her love until death do them part, not when he loves her still.

 

“At the start, after we were married, you made me believe that. You made me believe in you and in us. You made me love you and you made me believe in your love. And then you took it all away.”

 

“I _want_ to give it all back. It is yours. The truth is that it never stopped being yours. And I hope someday you’ll find it in your heart to accept it.”

 

Kenna doesn’t reply out loud, but he sees something flare in her eyes that’s been absent for a very long time – _hope_.

 

He will make her believe in them again, and believe it himself, and make sure that what they have together is never taken from them as long as they live.


End file.
